Aug 11, 2020

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey all,

The 'Barrels o' Fun' update is now available to download! (Thanks to u/TheGankeyCracker on Reddit for the name suggestion) We're introducing a whole new level to provide an alternative path to High Peak Castle to add more spice to the late-game, along with new weapons, enemies and explosions.

New biome

The new biome is called The Derelict Distillery and as with all the other levels in Dead Cells, we wanted to give it a distinct atmosphere. So expect to see loads of old broken barrels and bottles, pipes venting steam, cool looking metal containers in the background - that kind of thing. There’s also some barrels sitting around that you’ll be able to interact with in a couple of ways, some are harmless and others are quite a bit more dangerous...

New enemies

What’s a new level without new foes? Nothing, so you’ll find some huge fellas who throw some pretty big explosive barrels right into your face, or if you get too close they’ll just smash a barrel onto the ground and jump clear, leaving you to take the blast.

You’ll also have to deal with a sneaky mimic hiding among the regular barrels in the corridors. They’re not the toughest mob out there but they have a pretty devastating self-destruct which can catch you out if you're not careful. They’re also pretty fast, so they can and will chase you down.

New weapons

Onto the weapons now, and we thought that if enemies can hurl barrels at you, then you should be allowed to throw some straight back right? So we’re introducing the barrel launcher - a bazooka-style weapon that fires bouncing exploding barrels, what more can we say?

After shock damage arrived in our last update we needed to add a trap that can dish out shock damage too, so we created the tesla coil. Useful for dealing damage to large groups of enemies, throw it down whenever you need a bit of crowd control - which is pretty much always if we’re being honest!

Explosive barrels + breakable walls

Explosive barrels aren’t just limited to the barrel launcher and enemy abilities. You’ll find them dotted around the Distillery, and if you time it right you can use them to your advantage. Watch out though, because enemy attacks affect them as well so you need to be on your toes. Some mini platforming style sections are thrown into the level too. Yeah, there’s a lot of explosions in this biome…

Entire new soundtrack

As well as new gameplay content, there's also a whole new soundtrack available. The classic Dead Cells songs have been reworked by Yoann in the style of chiptune/8-bit music, so make sure to enjoy some retro style runs!

As always, full patchnotes are here if you want to see everything we've added/changed with this update.

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

@deathlysally_art

@vinegarclown

pmgster

Jul 1, 2020

The Update of Plenty has arrived!

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

After a lot of testing and plenty of patches, our 19th update has arrived! What started as an attempt to balance the game ended up as a complete revamp of many of the more underwhelming mechanics and items, hopefully for the better...

Before we get stuck into the changes, anyone who prefers their news in video form can listen to our summary VLOG in the dulcet tones of our very own Steve Filby.

Also, we need to point out that some translations are missing from the update so sorry if that affects you, they'll be available very soon :)

Right, let's get into the changes!

Item/weapon revamp

Lots of items & weapons have been nerfed or boosted, with the goal of opening up a wider range of builds, while not sacrificing what made the previous meta builds fun. If you want to know exactly which items have been changed and how, check out the patchnotes (link at the end of the post).

The biggest change that we've made is that all the crossbows are now two-handed, have two separate attacks and are Survival only. This lets you take advantage of the bigger health pool to make up for their slower fire rate but hefty damage. We're going to add some survival mutations to support the crossbows, but we’re just waiting to see how they perform instead of rushing out mutations that will need to be changed right away.

The crossbow changes are:

Heavy Crossbow:

Main fire not changed.
Off-hand instantly reloads your crossbow with a volley of critical bolts
The hook no longer pierce enemies, even with the "pierce enemies" affixes.
The damage dealt by the volley of bolts is now capped by a boss’ damage cap.

Repeater Crossbow:

Main hand fire rate has been reduced and now root every 4 bolts. No longer crit on rooted enemies.
Off-hand fires a volley of bolts all at once that inflict critical damages to rooted enemies.

Ice Crossbow:

Main hand fire has been mostly unchanged, except you can no longer charge a volley of critical bolts with it.
Off-hand fires a long range, ultra-fast bolt with infinite piercing which crits on frozen enemies.

Explosive Crossbow:

Main fire not changed.
Off-hand is now a melee combo ... with a surprise.

We’ve also added a backpack that lets you hold a one-handed weapon (but not use it) while you're holding a two-handed weapon. This way you can change to a cool one-handed item that you find on your travels and you won't have a useless empty weapon slot.

Economy & merchant rework

There's been a few economy changes in this update too, in short, we wanted to make pricing easier to understand and to allow players at higher difficulties to still be able to change their gear at merchants without spending all their money in one go.
While everything seemed to be fine at low difficulty levels, it got worse and worse in the higher BCs, where if you wanted to buy healing you would have to basically never spend any gold on anything else.
Now, those players will be able to change their approach in the middle of a run without worrying too much about being able to afford health later.

Summary of changes:

Removed gold scaling. Yes, it’s less impressive to have 4,500 gold instead of 45,000, but it makes it easier for us to work with and for people to assess how much gold they can spend or save
To replace gold scaling, gear price now goes up with item level
Refining and affix reroll costs have been changed
Shop categories are now stats instead of equipment type
Shop reroll is now free, but it makes the items on sale pricier
A decent amount of items had their price changed

++ & S weapon scroll removal

We’ve removed scrolls from ++ and S weapons, but to compensate for this we've added more scrolls to the early biomes, enemy damage has been reduced and gear damage has been increased.
This change was made to give gear level more importance again, and in tandem with the economy re-balance it will give you more opportunities (and an incentive) to switch gears during your run.

Damage over time effects

Damage over time effects were getting a bit of a bad rap for being indistinguishable or underwhelming, so we decided to try and give each of them a unique identity and in the process we added a fourth one, ‘shocked’. Most electric weapons and items will inflict this new shock DoT.

Shocked: deals damage over time to the target and all nearby targets, but it doesn’t spread on death like poison does.
Bleed rework: Stack enough bleed status on a target and the damage left is instantaneously dealt at once.
Poison rework: Upon an affected enemy's death, spread the poison status with reduced damage and only for the remaining duration.
Fire non-rework: Untouched, because fire was already perfect ;)

Difficulty progression

The difficulty curve between Boss Cells has been smoothed out, so difficulty spikes should be less of a problem. Yes, 2BC shouldn’t beat you up and take your lunch money anymore, well, not as much anyway.
We’ve also tried to make 0BC more challenging so new players learn more of the combat styles and to let them collect more gear/runes before progressing to the next difficulty level. Basically we want to stop them beating the 'tutorial' too quickly and then just getting smashed.

Damage mutation rework

Damage mutations (those who give a bonus DPS to your attacks) suffered from poor scaling, making them extremely useful at low difficulties while being less and less useful as you progress through the game.
To remedy that, we changed their effect from a bonus DPS to a bonus % of damages. This means that everything that boosts your attack (item level, item rarity, affixes, etc.) will synergize with those mutations.

For example, the Combo mutation used to work like this

And now it works like THIS

And finally, maybe the most important change of all:

Added an option to display or hide the Seed information above your minimap.

The full list of patchnotes is here, just be warned that it is pretty long so maybe get a snack before you dive in!

Thanks for the continued support and please leave any feedback in the comments here or over on our various channels like Discord or Reddit, the links are just below if you're interested :)

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

@jackknice

@MushPrum

u/Juanchudo

Jun 25, 2020

New patch for the 1.9 Beta

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

This is just a small update to let you know we've made further changes to the ongoing beta. This time around we're really focusing on smoothing out the difficulty curve to stop the huge difficulty spikes between certain Boss Cells and to make BC0 a bit more of a challenge to new players. We've also thrown in some smaller fixes for you too.

Here's the full list:

Balancing

All BCs difficulties have been tweaked:
- BC0 is probably going to feel harder, hence better preparing you for BC1. BC0 is supposed to teach you the basic mechanics, to dodge hits instead of facetanking, and to get you the most important meta upgrades (Runes, Health Flasks, etc.).
- BC1, BC2 and BC3 will feel easier, especially if your forge isn't at a good level. Overall, we're looking to have a smoother difficulty curve without the big walls we had before (looking at you BC1 & 2).
- BC4-5 new changes: increased High Peak Castle, Time Keeper, Giant and HoTK damage.
Some tweaks to the level of the gear you loot in some places:
- Toxic Sewers gear level increased by 1.
- Ossuary gear level decreased by 1.
- Ancient Sewers gear level increased by 1.
Harder biomes now also give more cells than easier ones.
Blood Sword bleed damage decreased. That thing was scary.

Graphics & UI

Faded the backpack slot in the HUD to clarify that the weapon in it is unavailable to use.

Quality of life

Added a Custom Game option to use the old category choices (item types rather than item colors) in the shops. This option does not lock achievements.
Thornies now face you when aggressively teleporting to you in BC4+.

Bug fixes

Fixed Adrenalin and Frenzy calculations to only scale with the base damage of an attack (before any scaling or damage buff, except critical hits, is taken into account). We were looking into nerfing these mutations when we found out that they weren't working as expected.
Fixed Rampager losing track of you after every dodge.
Fixed (probably) Knives Throwers dancing when they cannot decide what to do.

Feel free to leave any feedback here or on our reddit/discord channels :)

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

Amazing little crossover comic with Hyper Light Drifter and Hollow Knight by @Bano_Akira, we can't wait to see the rest!

u/SaltyFinalBoss

MrWajda

Jun 18, 2020

19th Update beta now open

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey,

The alpha for our 19th update is officially over, as the update seems fairly stable. So we need some lovely people to help us smooth off the edges in a beta run for the next couple of weeks while we keep working on the balance. We've also released some extra patchnotes for the beta release, you can check them out here.

There have been a whole lot of changes made during the alpha, so if you're not up-to-date with what we've been changing, you should take a look at our last few posts. We would post the list of patchnotes here but we'd definitely run over the character limit...

Anyway, if you've never participated in a beta before, you just need to follow these instructions and you'll be able to access it:

Go to your Steam game library.
Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
Select the tab "Betas".
In the first dropdown box select "beta".
Click close and wait for the download to finish.
Start playing.

We have a thread currently stickied on the Dead Cells subreddit to collect feedback and to just have general discussions, but you can also post on the #current-update-discussion channel on the Dead Cells' Discord if you prefer (links are below).

Finally, we are very aware that there aren't any survival mutations that properly support the two-handed crossbow playstyle right now. We prefer to see how they will be used, to better understand 2handed builds ' weaknesses and needs instead of implementing a mildly interesting design that we're not sure would be relevant.

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Community Highlights:

All melee weapons in badass pixel art by u/Juanchudo

@AsuruSOS 's careful Beheaded.

Jun 17, 2020

Final alpha patch for Update 19

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

The final patch for the Update 19 alpha is out! It's mostly about tweaking the balancing again - now that we've had a couple weeks of mass play-testing, we should have addressed all the hiccups that arrived with the initial changes. Should...

Patch notes are here or you can just read them below:

Balancing

Mobs hitting on the invulnerability shield are now only bumped horizontally, no longer interrupting some combos (Rampagers, notably). Lots of combos are still interrupted (Guardian Knights, Lacerator, etc.)
Affixes and mutations now affect damages dealt by DoTs. This only affects DoTs applied directly by items. Not poison clouds nor fire on the ground.
Toxic Cloud affix pool have been reworked (no more damage bonus affixes, more bonus effect on trigger, etc.).
Toxic Carbine now applies one stack of poison on impact.
Guardian no longer turn towards you during their attack animation. They can still turn during their combo.
Guardian's shield now requires a small threshold of damages to be applied before breaking.
Changed the new Sudden Death protection to only trigger upon fatal strike (but still protecting from wombo combos).
Slightly buffed Disengagement mutation to prevent your HP from descending under 20% while the mutation is active.
Conjunctivius "Touhou" rain of tears attack cooldown doubled.
QuickBow critical damage increased.
Frostbite damage increased.
All first bosses have less life but do more damage in BC4+.
Tiers 4 biomes (Stilt Village, Slumbering Sanctuary and Graveyard) mobs do less damage, Tiers 3* biomes do more in BC4+.
Librarians do more damage than in 1.9.2 (but still less than before).
High Peak Castle and last biome mobs have more health in BC4+.
Increased Giant and Time Keeper damage in BC4+.
Reverted the changes made to Tentacle Whip forward momentum.
When the eye of the Giant is out, both hands are now invulnerable.
Prevent the "victims burn" affix from appearing on ice items.
Damage received from traps are now capped at 30% of your maximum life.
Prevent food from spawning behind (possibly closed) ZDoors.
Buffed Grappling Hook: Controls are locked a shorter time.
You can now drop a maximum of one blueprint from mobs in a single level. This limitation does not apply to blueprints found in secret rooms or by using the Hunter's Grenade.

Graphics & UI

Clarified some items names and descriptions.
Changed the confusing keyword "immobilized" to the color-coded (and obviously, objectively much clearer) "root" in descriptions to clarify synergies.
Fire icon on oiled target is now blue. Let's put emphasis on those sweet sweet synergies.
Added a backpack icon on relevant UIs.

Quality of life

Explorer Instinct now signals mobs carrying precious loot with a star on the minimap.

Bug fixes

Giant's health bug fixed.
Fixed Elite mobs with the cloning ability not taking damage on aggro.
Fixed being unable to drop an item carried by the Homunculus by pressing dodge on some controller or keyboard configurations.
Fixed some spikes collisions.
Fixed invulnerable Guardian reacting to strikes like their shield was broken every time.
Fixed the explosion from the Explosive Crossbow off-hand strike counting as a melee hit (and triggering revenge damages from Thornies).

So, now that we've cleaned up the balancing, the beta should be launched very soon. If you didn't take part in the alpha testing but want to take part in the beta, keep an eye out for a new post this week.

That's all for now!

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Jun 10, 2020

Latest patch for Update 19 alpha

Dead Cells - mezzamazza55

Hey everyone,

We're back with another patch for the ongoing alpha. Most of the changes this time around are focused on 'balancing' - after all that's what Update 19 is all about!

The patchnotes are here, or you can find everything below:

Repeater Crossbow re-rework

Main fire now crits on rooted targets
Secondary fire shoots a volley of arrows in the air that rain down and roots targets

Balancing

Buffed Ice Crossbow:
- Increased range, projectile speed and damage of main fire.
- Slightly increased charge speed and recovery of secondary fire.
- Slightly decreased damage of secondary fire.
Improved chance of seeing different types of loot when re-rolling a category at the merchant. So for example, if you had 2 shields and a bow before re-roll, there's less chance of more bows appearing if you re-roll.
A whole load of enemy health & damage changes:
- Enemies do more damage in first and second biomes. (BC3+)
- Enemies have less health on third biomes. (BC3+)
- First Boss health has been decreased but damage has been increased. (BC3+)
- Giant's Hands have a bit more health. (All BCs)
- End game enemies have a bit more health (Castle and the spoiler biome) (BC3+)
- Damage cap of Conjunctivius' tentacles and Giant's Hand have been raised to make the fight a bit more fair when wielding slow weapons.
- Librarian does less damage: he was supposed to teach you the Boss pattern, not to be the "run ender" he has become.
Items inflicting the immobilized and shocked effects can no longer apply bonus damage on immobilized and shocked enemies.
Wings of the Crow cooldown raised (note that the item still needs work and we haven't decided which direction we should go yet).

So I guess the main game-changing thing here is the change in enemy difficulty from BC3+, but the Librarian change will probably be the most welcomed!

Graphics & UI

Improved display of backpack in the description of two-handed weapons.

Quality of life

When selecting an amulet and wearing the Prisoner's Collar, the choice UI is no longer displayed and the Prisoner's Collar is immediately replaced. Nothing major but one less mildly annoying thing in the game is always good!

Music & SFX

(The Bad Seed) Added some missing SFX on Jerkshrooms and Mushroom Boi.
Removed the random pitch variation for Repeater rapid-fire SFX.

Bug fixes

(The Bad Seed) Fixed holes sometimes appearing in the walls of the Arboretum.
Fixed Knives Thrower sometimes dancing undecided on the spot.
Fixed Rampager sometimes attacking without warning when exiting invisibility. Yeah this was pretty rage-inducing, we're sorry about that...
Fixed the Tentacle Whip dash changing direction when swapping items.
Fixed Fragment of the Philosopher's Stone dropping from almost every enemies in a level sometimes. No more roleplaying as Jeff Bezos.
Fixed being able to duplicate War Javelin by abusing ZDoors.
Fixed Crusher and Wolf trap not triggering "on destroy" affixes.
Fixed War Javelin teleport allowing you to skip bosses. Sorry speedrunners, back to the drawing board.
Fixed the background of the Clockroom being green.
Fixed multiple crashes.

That's it for this patch, speak to you real soon!

Thanks,
Matt, EE & MT